Multiple PDFs, open and fully visible *at once*? Not partially hidden by other windows or sized so small the text is hard to read? The only way to do that with iPads is to have multiple iPads, and if using monitors, to have multiple monitors.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
At $3,500, will you buy a Vision Pro?
- Thread starter KPOM
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
You're not very experienced, I can see. My 40" 5k2k display that I use everyday would allow a good 4-5 full height PDF documents side by side. Try again.
The only reason I would do it is to join the development community for it. I've thought about trying to get into that early on, but I'll have to see whether it gains enough traction before I'll be willing to spend $3,500 on it.
Ok, you have a great monitor. I don't have space for such a big monitor on my desk. Also, such a monitor is not mobile. Vision Pro would let me have the display space of such a big monitor anywhere I want.
1. Every desk has space for such a monitor.
2. Vision Pro is not very mobile.
Keep going.
1. How do you know how big "every desk" is?
2. I could take Vision Pro to any room in my house. I could take it with me on a trip and use it in the hotel room.
Edit: oh, you said 40" monitor -- I thought you said a much bigger size. A 40" monitor, I think could show 3-4 PDFs at full size. With VP, you could show more than that.
Last edited:
I agree that whether or not VP is comfortable to use for long periods is an unknown at this point. And it would be annoying to switch battery packs every two hours, though I expect I'll mostly keep it plugged into the wall. I'm certainly not going to be buying the first gen. I'll let the early adopters play beta tester, and wait for it to be more refined and hopefully come down in price.
In what world is the Vision Pro not mobile compared to a literal 40 inch monitor???
Wtf.
1. I said 40". What other interpretation of 40" is there?
2. As the owner of the 40", I told you it can fit 4-5 PDFs at full height, side by side. Not 3-4.
3. Have you see a single vision pro UI example that shows you with more windows than that open and side by side? No, no one has, because that's not how vision pro works. Watch a developer session or two, instead of just fantasizing.
A 30" display is "more" mobile than a 40" one. That doesn't mean it is mobile in any usable way.
1. Sorry, I had a senior moment.
2. When talking about "full-size" pdf windows, I'm thinking about a pdf displaying letter-size pages. I'm not convinced you can fit 4-5 PDFs of that size side by side on a 40" monitor. I think that's why I got the impression you were talking about a much bigger monitor.
3. Even if you can only open 3 PDFs at once on a VP, it's still more portable than any desktop monitor. For instance, if my back pain is flaring up and I have trouble sitting in a desk chair, the VP might allow me to do my computing from my bed or from my living room arm chair.
I'm not proclaiming that VP will in fact be useful for me. There are many questions still to be answered. I'm not aware of any technical reasons why VP shouldn't be able to handle 5-6 pdf windows at once, and "nobody did it during the developer sessions" doesn't exactly convince me it can't do that. But there could very well be other as yet unknown drawbacks that make the VP not very useful. I just think it's premature to declare it completely useless, just as it would be to declare it the best thing ever in computing.
Come on.
I'm sure we can do better than thinking about the tiny use-case for most people of floating virtual screens.
That's not exactly a "Vision" of what amazing things will be possible.
It's arguing about the most boring and basic a function, a 2D screen in the air whilst your wear the headset.
How about we consider not having 2D screens?
If you think of the real world in 3D space, then we don't think in 2D
So let's move forward and consider how to use computers in different more advanced ways.
I'm sure we can do better than thinking about the tiny use-case for most people of floating virtual screens.
That's not exactly a "Vision" of what amazing things will be possible.
It's arguing about the most boring and basic a function, a 2D screen in the air whilst your wear the headset.
How about we consider not having 2D screens?
If you think of the real world in 3D space, then we don't think in 2D
So let's move forward and consider how to use computers in different more advanced ways.
But most of the work we do in real life is 2D. Record keeping, accounting, writing correspondence, writing reports. The type of work that could benefit from 3D, like architecture, engineering, medicine -- those kinds of works are practiced by much less people than just boring 2D work. I think for virtual/argumentative reality platforms to go mainstream, it has to make boring 2D work just a little bit better for people, by subtly adding 3D elements to mostly 2D work. Like hopefully, having lots of 2D windows floating around in 3D space makes it easier to keep them organized and to find the right window when you need it.
A lot of it comes down to what kinds of problems this technology will solve for me in my everyday life. I bought an Apple Watch SE just to see what it was like, but I find myself not often wearing it because it doesn't really solve anything for me that my phone doesn't solve. Of course, others do have better uses for them and do get a lot of value out of them, but for me, why would I go through the trouble of charging it every night when my phone already does everything that I need?
That's sort of how I've felt about VR and AR. Do they solve problems that weren't solved before by existing technologies? Of course. But for most users, they're probably just gonna pull out their phones, tablets, or computers unless they are doing something specific that would benefit from a VR headset. Some will have these workflows, but I think that it's far from the next iPhone revolution. I don't see it really ever catching on in the broad mainstream, but I do think that as a niche market, it will remain.
(If someone shrunk it down to the size of, say, a typical pair of sunglasses, now THAT would be a revolution. But I think we are still many years away from having the technology to make that viable.)
This is a silly argument. It's not about opinions. It's simple math. A 40" monitor can't display 5 side by side letter-size PDFs without overlaps. 8.5 × 5 = 42.5".
Yes, I've seen examples in the VisionOS simulator with many more windows than that
All All-in-one VR headsets are mobile in a usable way. I can transport them on my person about as easily as, say, an SLR camera with a lens.
And a laptop of any size can't even show a single letter-size page at actual size unless you display it in landscape.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, but have you considered that maybe he's accounting for scaling when displaying these PDFs? Documents aren't always displayed at 100%.
They said “at full height”.
Of the other hand, if you want to view a bunch of PDFs with a Vision Pro, you‘d want to view them at much bigger than 100% actual size, to account for the focus distance of the headset which will be more than the typical distance that people read paper from.
VR headsets give you more working area/volume than anything with similar or better portability. That’s what this all comes down to.
Whether or not that benefits the user will depend on the user. If you have plenty of space for one or many large monitors, and wouldn’t benefit from more than a MacBook’s worth of desktop space when away from your desktop computer, then a VR headset probably won’t be useful to you, unless you are taking advantage of the unique 3D perspective that VR provides.
For most tasks that I do that require multiple monitors, I also require a desktop-class OS, so the first generation Vision Pro would have limited use for me. But some people do tasks that will not need a desktop-class OS, but would benefit from more space.
Bringing up a 30 inch display doesn't make the comparison any less ridiculous.
The Vision Pro can easily fit in a backpack assuming it's about the size of a Quest.
It should take a bit more space than Apple's AirPods Max for example but still fairly doable. If anything, the modular design might make it even more compact than a Quest or even the AirPods Max, whose headband can't be bent at all, so it's constantly taking a large fixed amount of space/volume wherever you store it. Compare to Sony's headphones that can fold for comparison.
That is very mobile whether you care to admit it or not. The only issue with mobility is the short battery life. But last time I checked 40 inch monitors still need to be plugged in.
You can bring and use a Vision Pro on a plane. You cannot do the same with a monitor. The AVP is categorically mobile and usable.
The limitations of the AVP will arise from the display resolution and optics and Apple's own software limitations. E.g. only being able to mirror a single Mac screen. But even that would be useful when used alongside visionOS's apps.
Last edited:
Sadly none of the 3D software I use and know of in the industry runs easily on a Mac, so this sort of product isn’t suitable at this point for engineers. I don’t think I’d want to be designing wearing a headset though in all honesty, it would spin me out after a short period of time.
This is my personal use case.
I don't need a desktop-class OS beyond programming and some software like Blender. Though I fundamentally still need a Mac (since Apple seemingly seems uninterested in opening up iPad OS and likely visionOS).
So it would personally be more than enough to have the Vision Pro to mirror my Mac's display while simultaneously being able to pull up Safari, YouTube, Discord etc all around me.
It's actually what I do with my 12.9 iPad. It works great as a second monitor on the go.
Of course, I could always buy actual monitors and set something up in my room. But then I'd be stuck in my room--I wouldn't even be able to easily move to another room in my own home let alone travel with them.
If I can bring that multi-monitor set-up with me everywhere, I'd be ecstatic. And that's where AVP's potential lies.
Indeed, most of the computing work we have done from day one has and mostly is 2D based on a flat display as opposed to the "real 3D world" because that as always been the limitation of display technology, so all of our ideas and software have had to conform to what will work on a 2D representation of inputting and viewing information.
If we imagine for one moment, way back at the very beginning of computing we were able to create/project a totally 3D environment, just like the real world is.
I would suggest by now, many decades later that our views of how we use such devices would be vastly different.
We have been born into a world where we think of computing as a 2D experience as opposed to the real 3D world.
Perhaps there are better ways to use technology than a flat 2D plane?
I know it's hard for us now to consider this, as i said, all of our lives we have understood computing is a 2D concept.
But we are 3D (4D) creatures living in a 3D (4D) world, so I'm sure as time moves on we can expand into this until now missing dimension.
Hence why I suggested as going from a hardware 2D screen to floating 2D screens is not "THE" most ground-breaking concept we should be able to think about.
Just chiming in but I'm curious about the transition to 3D as well.
I feel like floating 2D screens are just the beginning. For a lot of use cases 2D is better (e.g. editing text, photo editing, spreadsheets etc.) but I feel like there's a lot of potential in 3D as well, even on those primarily-2D applications. But it definitely will depend on how well executed things are.
For example, in PowerPoint or Keynote, everything can still be 2D but having things laid out in a 3D space around you might feel more natural and intuitive. Your presentation notes floating somewhere you can easily see them, the next slide preview next to you, so you can easily change slides without fumbling with a keyboard, mouse, or a clicker etc.
I think this one of those things that people will need to start experiencing and experimenting to reach its full potential.
I get what you are saying, but I think the problem goes back further than the beginning of computing. Most of the things we do now with computers were done on paper with pens before -- that is, they were done in 2D. So we aren't talking about changing habits and ways of thinking that developed over a few decades, it's things that's been done in 2D for thousands of years. It's not as simple as we live in 3D, so we should be able to think up ways to do work in 3D. We live in 3D yes, but a lot of the kinds of work we do on computers were always 2D to begin with.